Experts clarify heat doesn’t justify increases in the electricity bill

Increases in electricity bills affecting thousands of Dominican households are not due to the heat, but to errors in consumption estimates made by distributors when meters malfunction, warned engineers Luis Ozuna and Luis Moquette, directors of Tecni Electric, a company specializing in control, distribution, and electrical measurement.

During a conversation on the program “What We Have Radio”, both professionals explained that, although high temperatures can slightly influence consumption, they do not justify the abrupt increases that many users are experiencing.

Industrial engineer Luis Moquette, the company’s logistics manager, explained that the electricity tariff is made up of various factors, but he emphasized that “in many cases, the increases are not due to actual consumption, but to estimates made by the distributors when communication with the meters is interrupted.”

“Technically, you could say that sometimes you are charged for the outage. It’s not a direct abuse, but an automatic projection of the system that assumes consumption remained the same while there was no connection with the meter,” Moquette specified.

From his side, electrical engineer Luis Ozuna, Tecni Electric’s project supervisor, added that these adjustments are usually more frequent in summer, when high temperatures, greater use of refrigeration equipment, and deficiencies in the distribution network coincide.

“It’s not realistic for a household to double or triple its electricity consumption from one month to the next without having changed its lifestyle or increased the number of installed appliances. Heat can influence it, but it doesn’t explain such drastic increases,” Ozuna indicated.

Both experts agreed that consumers should demand transparency and review their consumption patterns, because “we live in a Caribbean country, where the heat is constant, not in a climate that changes from extreme to extreme in a few months,” recalled Moquette.